Vote as if democracy’s life depends on it. It does.

You could hear the anxiety in her voice as one of Kosovo’s leading investigative reporters, a victim of police raids not unlike those experienced here a year ago, asked a plaintive question while visiting Marion earlier this month.

Why stay in a field like journalism with low pay, bad hours, and misplaced hatred of media that really should be reserved for talking heads on cable TV instead of actual reporters who gather rather than spin the news?

“Have you ever thought of just giving up?” she asked in English far better than the Albanian her hosts might ever be able to muster.

It wasn’t an original question. We heard the same a week later at a gathering of the Institute for Rural Journalism in Kentucky. We read the same complaint two weeks before that from a Missouri editor on an email list operated by the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors.

Probe a little deeper, and the question isn’t so much why people continue to work in a high stress, low pay, often dangerous profession. All of them get that. Like clergy, teachers, Peace Corps volunteers, and people in thousands of other essential occupations that are hardly lucrative or relaxing, they regard journalism as a calling, not a job.

But journalists are concerned about one thing.

“We can report something important and true, and people even agree that it is,” one of them said, “but then they do absolutely nothing about it.”

It’s not that journalists — real ones, not “talking heads” — have agendas they want the public to follow. They’re humans. They have opinions. But they see their mission not as persuading but informing, and then letting the public decide — whether it chooses the option they would prefer or some other.

It’s that the public all too often complains but all too seldom speaks up at meetings, runs for office, or worse yet votes on the basis of anything other than knee-jerk reactions to hot-button issues with little to no relevance to the daily life of their communities.

As we head into the home stretch of a presidential campaign featuring two candidates with more negatives than positives, we’re poised to see record low voter turnout.

Add to this the fact that the only other ballot races in Marion County will be in two of five commissioner districts, and we have the makings of an election in which only a tiny portion of citizens will avail themselves of a right that generations have fought and died for.

That’s not the way to look at the upcoming election, however.

We don’t get to vote in Marion County whether to retain the magistrate who apparently failed to read a fatally flawed search warrant application before approving the police raid heard round the world. But we do get a chance to vote on whether to retain the district court judge who refused to get involved and may be just as responsible for the mess that ensued.

We won’t have an opportunity to vote on the county attorney who also failed to read the warrant applications, and there’s no opponent on the ballot for the sheriff who expressed great misgivings but instead of blocking the raid contributed staff to it and threw a pizza party afterward while carefully not getting personally involved.

We can, however, choose one of two write-in candidates to replace the county attorney and should ask them whether they plan to do better should a similar situation arise.

And those of us in two of the gerrymandered county commissioner districts will be able to choose which among five candidates seem most likely to promote the type of openness in government that was so sorely lacking both before and after the raid. We also can vote for which of the candidates think it’s a priority to redistrict to get rid of the gerrymandering that created their districts.

We can’t get rid of either of our state legislators, neither of whom has managed to do anything to officially acknowledge the challenge the raid posed to democracy or to address any of the legal loopholes officials are scrambling to crawl through to avoid responsibility afterward.

But we can withhold our votes for them. It may not seem like much, but skipping over a name or writing in a name of someone else still sends a message that we want our elected officials to do better.

Visiting a polling place is nowhere near as challenging as sitting in a foxhole, behind a sand dune, or in a rice paddy while armed enemies who would just as soon snuff out your life as breathe pass dangerously close.

If we, as citizens, aren’t willing to exercise even that most minimal of democratic responsibilities, we don’t deserve newspapers and become hypocrites when we recite the Pledge of Allegiance or stand for the national anthem.

The swamp so many people talk about isn’t just inside Washington’s Beltway. It’s just as deep right here in River City. And voters must choose whether they want to be part of the solution or part of the problem by remaining cloistered in their own personal lives rather than engaging in the city, county, state, and national communities we claim to love but too often do little to help improve.

— ERIC MEYER